Rough Magic Page 9
Unlike the majority of Lookout Farm’s employees, Ilo lived on the premises. Into a cramped room constructed in the barn loft he had stuffed his belongings, which included a huge collection of art supplies. One rainy afternoon well into the summer, Sylvia saw his room firsthand: they had both finished their duties for the day, when Ilo invited her up to look at the drawing of a co-worker he had just completed. However, it was not long after they had climbed the wooden stairs to the barn loft, and he closed the door behind them, that Sylvia learned Ilo’s real motive. Once Sylvia had looked at the picture, Ilo suddenly pressed close to her and, forcefully embracing her, crushed her body into his. Then, in the tiny room whose air was thick with the stench of hay and farm animals, Ilo French-kissed her. Startled, Sylvia struggled free from his grasp. Why did he do that? she demanded. But Ilo offered her, instead of an explanation, a glass of water. Sylvia bolted from the room, leaving Ilo standing by himself.
She might have escaped Ilo—she would have nothing else to do with him that summer—but she could not avoid the larger issue of sex. “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” the story Seventeen published in August, deals with a young woman’s bittersweet romance. Appearing in the magazine’s “It’s All Yours” section and accompanied by a postage-stamp-size reproduction of Plath’s senior portrait and a contributor’s note that ended by revealing that “[j]azz makes [Sylvia] melt inside, Debussy and Chopin suit her dreamier moods,” the story addressed the issue of unrequited teenage love. One rainy afternoon in late August, Celia, the story’s narrator, reflects back on the summer’s events, which led to her being hurt by “a freckle-faced boy named Bruce,” her former boyfriend. “[T]all, with knife-sharp eyes that can see right into you and tell what you’re thinking,” Bruce was, as it turned out, unfaithful. Meeting at the tennis courts, Celia, sixteen, and Bruce, nineteen, set out on an innocent romance: they enjoyed canoe rides on a lake at night, lots of tennis, and dates to an ice-cream parlor. They would have continued their involvement, Celia states, had she not accidentally bumped into Bruce and “an adorable blonde girl” walking out of the ice-cream parlor one afternoon. The next day, when Bruce tried to make up, Celia angrily rebuffed him, saying their relationship was over. “All right, Celia,” Bruce said. “I won’t bother you any more. I hadn’t figured you were like this. My mistake.” Alone, Celia found comfort in a Sara Teasdale poem. “With my own will I turned the summer from me,” the poem’s speaker says. “And summer will not come to me again.”
Sylvia identified with Celia. In her diary she revealed that the inspiration for Bruce was John Hodges, who had told her he loved her and then proceeded to date a cute, blond-haired girl. Readers also responded favorably to the story. One was Eddie Cohen, a twenty-one-year-old Chicago college student and English major. In a fan letter—Plath’s first—written in early August, he said with studied shame that he sometimes nabbed his “kid sister” ‘s copy of Seventeen to “keep up on my short story technique.” After this, he discussed Plath’s story in positive but guarded language. “Why it should have so captivated me, I don’t fully know. In part, though, it was because I felt that there was a thought behind the story which was expressed rather more subtly than the usual Seventeen hit-’em-with-a-brick technique, and also because it seemed that the author (or authoress, as it developed) had an insight into people which was a little above average.” In the end, he asked Plath to tell him “a bit more about yourself, or even let me read some more of your writing,” adding finally, “I will spend a good deal of time the next few weeks in peering anxiously into the mailbox, so please don’t let me down.”
Flattered, Sylvia responded on August 6. She confessed her skepticism about his letter; then she proceeded, using a chatty pen-pal prose style, to paint a thumbnail sketch of her life. She lived in a six-room suburban house; her father was dead and her mother taught; she had a younger brother; she planned to enter college next month; and she wanted to be a writer so badly that she had endured the humiliation of receiving fifty rejection slips from an assortment of magazines before a single piece of her creative writing had been accepted. “And Summer Will Not Come Again” had been that first acceptance. When she finished describing herself, Sylvia felt a rush of doubt. What if Eddie was not dealing with her honestly and his letter was a fake? (Unlike Eddie, she considered “And Summer Will Not Come Again” typical Seventeen “drivel"—nothing more.) Giving in to her fears, she posed to Eddie an improbable—but to her mind possible—scenario: because he had a bet with Ernest Hemingway on his ability to trick young women writers, maybe Eddie was setting her up to make fun of her in his next letter. Anyway, how on earth had he gotten her home address? (Eddie had mailed his letter to 26 Elmwood Road, not Seventeen.) And at what college was he an English major? Her walls of defense in place, Sylvia sent the letter.
On August 8, Eddie wrote back. About her address: he had found it in a Boston telephone directory in Marshall Field & Co., that “venerable Chicago institution.” About his schooling: after two years on scholarship at the University of Chicago, he now went to Roosevelt College, a school that “owes its fame to the fact that it is a little too liberal for some tastes.” About himself: dark-brown-haired and blue-eyed, he was “an even six feet, on the rare occasions when I stand up straight, and have 155 pounds scattered pretty evenly over the frame, not muscle-bound to be sure, but not anemic, either”; preferred informal dress (normally he wore a T-shirt and jeans or a “slightly soiled” sport shirt and slacks); considered himself “unconventional,” “semi-bohemian,” and a “cynical idealist” although he had been born on affluent Lake Shore Drive (“I’ve had my share of convertibles and sport coats, dances and socials”); and aspired to be a writer or an artist. “And as for you,” he concluded, “I rather like what I know of you so far. . . . So let us have more.”
In his letter Eddie did not mention the real circumstances under which he first read “And Summer Will Not Come Again.” Strolling through Marshall Field one day, he felt an overpowering force draw him to the magazine rack—and Seventeen magazine. Compelled, he scanned the table of contents, ran across Sylvia’s name, and read the story straight through as he stood in the middle of the store. Afterwards, he walked over to the section of telephone directories, found the Boston book, and looked up her address. It was almost as if some greater spirit had guided him to Sylvia’s story—and to Sylvia—but he could not tell her this. It simply sounded too far-fetched.
It did not matter. On August 11, the day The Christian Science Monitor printed in its Youth Section “Bitter Strawberries,” her first poem to appear in a national publication, Sylvia answered Eddie’s letter. Once she had described her physical appearance—five feet eight, slim, her hair streaked blond by the sun, she was so deeply tanned that women stopped her on the beach to ask what suntan oil she used— Sylvia said, in terms of her personality, she was unconventional, sarcastic, and skeptical. As for religion, she considered herself an atheist by theory, a Unitarian by practice. Next she set out her overriding problem with boyfriends. When they looked at her, they believed that she was not intelligent. Sensing she could trust Eddie, Sylvia finally delved into her family and told him that she was more like her mother than she had been like her father, a college professor and author of a book on bumblebees who was now dead.
Over the next two weeks, Eddie wrote Sylvia four letters—three from Chicago and one from Mexico City, where he went on vacation. In those letters he continued to reveal himself. Although he wanted to go into psychiatry as a profession, since “the workings of people’s minds [are] the most fascinating subject which I have yet encountered,” he did not have the industry to attend medical school for six years. “[Generally labeled [an] atheist,” he was really an agnostic. He had once been engaged to a young woman named Bobbe, but had broken things off. And, most surprising to Sylvia, he found himself “in the ridiculous and embarrassing position of being infatuated with a girl I never even met"—Sylvia! “Right now that 1500 miles [the distance from Chicago t
o Boston], like all chaperones, is becoming rather annoying,” Eddie wrote, “and if you don’t stop building yourself up to me, you are liable to wake up some morning and find me sitting in a tent on your front lawn.” Sylvia answered each letter. Now, as she would in the future, she opened up to Eddie. Maybe he saw the fifteen-hundred-mile chaperone as an obstacle to be overcome; on the contrary, Sylvia regarded it as a buffer that allowed her to reveal herself to Eddie without risking any physical—or romantic—involvement.
That August, Sylvia continued to submit poems and stories to magazines, and at mid-month, Seventeen bought “Ode to a Bitten Plum.” She constantly ran errands, now that Smith was only weeks away. She also dated throughout the month. Of those dates, one Saturday night would stand out in her mind. After Emile, a temporary boyfriend, picked her up for a double date with Warren (a friend) and Warren’s girlfriend, they all drove to Ten Acres, a local dance club. Unable to buck her all-American-virgin persona, Sylvia ordered ginger ales while her three friends drank beer. Following a long chat, Emile took Sylvia out onto the dance floor, where, their talk having broken the ice, they embraced affectionately as they danced. Soon, in an open display of sexuality, Emile rubbed his body so forcibly into Sylvia’s that she felt his erect penis against her stomach. Aroused, Sylvia pressed her breasts hard against his chest. Before the dance ended, Emile buried his face in her hair and whispered hoarsely, “Don’t look at me.” Why? she asked. “I’ve come out of a swimming pool, hot and wet.”
Later, at Warren’s, after a drive during which they necked in the back seat of the car, Emile and Sylvia slow-danced in the faint light of the living room to music drifting from a phonograph. Still later, in the dark kitchen, Emile kissed her again. “You don’t give a damn about me, except physically,” Sylvia said, and Emile responded by kissing her even more forcefully. Finally, Emile drove her home. Upstairs in bed, Sylvia thought about the night. She hated Emile for the very injustice she had accused him of—not caring about her “except physically"—yet she also felt a strong sexual attraction towards him. This was, in fact, her predicament. She wanted to act on her sexual urges but could not because she was afraid she would be labeled “fast” and lose the respect of the very boys she hoped to date.
On September 1, after ten weeks, Sylvia quit her Lookout Farm job. In sum, she regarded the experience with pleasure. From the white-collar, cerebral household in which she lived, she had ventured out into a world where she worked with her hands in the dirt beside people who were often less fortunate than she. In addition, she adored, as she had in those summers when she played on Winthrop’s beaches, being outside. Early in September, Sylvia reflected on her weeks at Lookout Farm in an essay entitled “Rewards of a New England Summer,” which The Christian Science Monitor ran on the 12th. In a move that would become habit throughout her life, Sylvia took recent personal events and, because she wanted both the money and the prestige that resulted from publication, used them as the basis for a piece of creative work. As she would also do in the future, she manipulated those events to achieve a desired result. Even though the Lookout Farm job represented long days of sweaty work in the hot sun and a near-disastrous, sexually suggestive encounter with Ilo, Sylvia painted a sweetly sentimental picture in “Rewards of a New England Summer.” Near the conclusion of the essay, she wrote:
And then, suddenly, it was the end of August—my last day of work. I could hardly believe I wouldn’t be biking up to the farm any more. All the days of my ten weeks there had flowed together, melted into each other so that only one solid impression remained, a blend of blue skies, sunlight, and green fields.
Full Fathom Five
1
By way of Elm Street, a visitor arrived at Smith College from Northampton, a quaint, claustrophobic town that boasted three hotels, a bus station, a train depot, a police station, a movie theatre, several retail stores and restaurants, and a variety of small businesses that catered to Smith clientele—The Quill Bookstore, The Hampshire Bookshop, The CoflPee Shop (an English Department hangout), and two competing pizzerias, Joe’s and Rahar’s. Encircling the business district were residential neighborhoods in which the town’s year-round citizens lived. But, for all practical purposes, Northampton existed because of Smith College. Scenically, the campus, large if not sprawling, emanated grace and beauty. A central cluster of buildings comprised of a library, a gymnasium, and classroom and administration buildings—all red-brick three- and four-story structures that had been built after the turn of the century—was surrounded by the schools “houses.” With names like Haven, Northrop, and Chapin, these multistory brick buildings, in which between fifty and seventy-five girls lived, contributed to a pervasive pastoral gentility, which Smith’s most famous landmark, Paradise Pond, seemed best to personify.
Founded in 1871 when Sophia Smith, an area resident, bequeathed a trust fund of four hundred thousand dollars with “the design to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our colleges for men,” Smith had become, by 1950, one of the country’s premier undergraduate institutions. In keeping with its socially conservative tradition, the school demanded that each of its twenty-four hundred students conform to steadfast regulations. “We were lemmings unto the sea,” remembers Judy Ettlinger, a Smith student in the early fifties; “we were a generation that did not question.”
At that time no one stopped to question Smith’s requirement that every incoming freshman pass a hygiene test (failure meant a course in hygiene), undergo a swimming test by swimming two lengths of an indoor pool (failure meant swimming lessons), and submit to “posture pictures,” nude photographs, both front and side angles, taken by members of the physical-education department to determine whether there was proper alignment (failure meant a posture-training course). Obediently, each Smith student attended mandatory Wednesday chapel; checked in and out when leaving campus on weekends; met curfews often o’clock on school nights, twelve on Fridays, and one on Saturdays; and wore appropriate attire to supper, which, being formal, was served on linen tablecloths. Certainly no one questioned the college’s requirement that each student adhere to strict social and academic honor systems.
On Mountain Day, students noted the arrival of fall by scouting the countryside to admire the leaves’ changing colors. On Rally Day, originally a commemoration of George Washington’s birthday but later broadened to become a celebration of Smith itself, seniors wore their graduation robes for the first time. In the auditorium seniors, dressed in black robes, sat in a single group surrounded by underclassmen, all of whom wore white. One could not help remarking the stunning sight—a knot of black engulfed by an ocean of white. And, on Graduation Day, seniors rolled hoops down a sloping green lawn. The young woman who rolled her hoop most expertly, and reached the finish line first, won “the prize,” which was, according to campus folklore, the promise that she would marry before any other senior. That a “Smithie,” as she was nicknamed, had put in four years at one of the country’s top colleges did not mean she was not also expected to marry, have a family, and run a home. “At Smith, you were attempting to do some good work to fill in the time before you got married,” remembers Gloria Steinem, another student from the early fifties. “Your only real life-changing mechanism was marriage, and then after that you assumed your husband’s existence. At the time, this was the way life was.”
The subject of young men—and courtship culminating in marriage—often dominated a Smith student’s mind. “In the fifties we were girls, not women,” declares Polly Longsworth, another contemporary of Plath’s at Smith. “We came from middle- and (mostly) upper-middle-class homes, and had had rather sheltered upbringings. We were interested in boys, academics, and athletics, probably in that order. Sexual experimentation tended to be somewhat limited, largely because we came from ‘nice’ families and because fear of pregnancy (and especially the accompanying social humiliation) was strongly operative. Inevitably, there was more going on than most would
own to— the inherent quest for a mate was part of the four years at college, and ‘going steady’ the prized norm. Few, however, were casual or promiscuous about sex.” Rules governing dating were not that different from those at other Northeastern colleges. Usually, a boy from an Ivy League college invited a Smith student on a date. (Smithies favored boys from Harvard and Yale.) If the boy and girl did not already know each other (many had attended prep school together), a third party often put the two in contact; blind dating played a major role in the social life of many students. Once asked, a Smithie traveled by bus or by train to the boy’s school, where she stayed near campus in a bed-and-breakfast. On their date, the boy took her to campus events like football or basketball games and the affiliated parties. Naturally, a girl could invite a boy to Smith—proms and dances were logical occasions for dates—at which time the sequence of events was reversed. And of course sex, in the form of sexual intercourse, remained relatively taboo. Should a couple have sex—only after dating for some time—they did not discuss it with others. One place a couple would never have sex was a Smith house, for rules prohibited boys from going above the house’s first floor. If a girl did take a boy upstairs, she was supposed to shout, “Man on the floor}’’—so that all girls within earshot would be properly forewarned.